Black Hat SEO v/s White Hat SEO – What’s the Difference?

Practicing SEO isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Many companies who have tried their hands in this domain have reviewed this task to be challenging and herculean. To apply the correct and befitting SEO techniques, the web masters have to be very judicious about the use of words since more than often the same gets misunderstood by readers consuming the wrong context. So, the techniques used in SEO targeted towards improving the company’s rank on the popular search engines are categorized under White Hat SEO techniques that sometimes extend to Black Hat SEO.

Talking about the prime area of difference Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO techniques are as different as good from bad. To do any task, there are two ways either right or wrong; similarly the implementation of SEO techniques can also go wrong sometimes dragging them into the category of Black SEO. Following the prescribed parameters, criteria, and trends set by the internationally by SEO professionals and those in tandem with major search engines are White Hat SEO techniques.

The problem area grows when some webmasters or SEO experts start to misuse the White hat techniques and end up spamming the posts and other popular SEO methods. These techniques are strongly rejected by the popular search engine namely Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. A common example of Black Hat SEO techniques is back link building that is done in the form of blogging and results in a huge pile of spamming. It also involves varied tricks such as “Guest posting” or “Article directory submission”.

Precisely Black Hat Techniques aren’t meant for long term purpose and the results fade away in no time as soon as the spanned items are identified and removed. Another big disadvantage of using Black Hat SEO Techniques is that sites that apply these techniques get blacklisted by major search engines..

White Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques are legal and ethical ways of driving high volume of quality traffic to a website which is improved over the coming time period. Black Hat SEO also attempts to improve the rankings but the methods used aren’t approved by search engines and encompasses trick and deception. These techniques go against the existing guidelines and do not comply with the ethical ways of improving the site ranking.

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Other major points of difference is that Black hat techniques involve unnecessary stuffing of keywords, link farming, doorway and cloaked pages, hidden texts and links, and blog comment spam whereas White Hat SEO techniques involve in-depth research and analysis, rephrasing of relevant meta tags, improvement of content and refurbishments of web design. Also even if white hat techniques take a relatively longer time to improve search rankings, the results last for a pretty good time giving a site enough exposure to for a consistent customer base. Some of the good white hats tactics quality inbound link building, use structural mark up etc.

A part from this, use of Black Hat SEO Techniques can get a site banned or heavily penalized owing to the use of unethical practices. Also, these methods demolish the entire being of a site and damage is irreparable.

Lucy Orloski, Content Community Manager in SEOHeights, a Canada based digital marketing company, has worked in a number of capacities in marketing since 2008. She provides consultancy for increasing traffic through search engines, social media, email marketing and improving the site and page conversion rates to increase sales using existing visitor traffic. If you want to increase traffic, sales or want branding of your business then contact me